The Flowers and Books at Crowfield Church

 As mentioned on Saturday I went to the flower festival at Crowfield church mainly for the bookstall 😃

The theme of the Flower Festival this year was Children's Nursery Rhymes and Poems and I took some photos because I'm always impressed by flower arranging which is something I've never learned to do. (Didn't photograph all the arrangements as there were 30+ around this small church.)

The guide leaflet had the history of some of the rhymes which was interesting.

Hickory Dickory Dock below, was first found published in 1744. It might have been based on a clock in Exeter Cathedral 

Old MacDonald had a Farm, below. The earliest version dates from 1706 in an opera called "The Kingdom of the Birds or Wonders of the Sun"

The Owl and The Pussy Cat, below, is one of Edward Lear's nonsense poems from 1871.

Ten Green Bottles, below, is a very old counting song going back as far as the C14. (We sang this endlessly at Primary School!)

Hey Diddle Diddle, The Cat and the Fiddle, below, is thought to date back to at least C16 and gave rise to many Cat and Fiddle pub names.

Ring-a-ring of Roses, below, probably composed in the late C17 and may refer to the Plague with the roses being a red rash and the sneezing being an symptom.

And each side of the porch a Teddy Bears Picnic was happening. The melody was composed in 1907 and lyrics added in 1932.

Outside they had a tombola and plant stalls and of course the big gazebo full of  second-hand books. Not as many books as they sometimes have, although they'd got lots in boxes under the table which they said they would put out later when they had room - which always seems an odd thing to me as they can't sell books unless people can see them!

Anyway, I picked up four for 50p each =  a Persephone - Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, another of Alexander McCall Smith's stand alone books - My Italian Bulldozer (what a curious title!), H.E Bates -Fair Stood The Wind For France and a children's book just because I liked the picture on the front cover. The book is a bit tatty so after it's been read I'll probably add that cover picture to my scrapbook.

The Church is open everyday so I will go back for a proper Church visit and then I'll carry on through the back road to Coddenham because Crowfield was a Chapel of Ease to Coddenham well into the 20th Century.

A chapel of ease (or chapel-of-ease) is a church building other than the parish church, built within the bounds of a parish for the attendance of those who cannot reach the parish church conveniently, generally due to distance away. Often a chapel of ease is deliberately built as such, being more accessible to some parishioners than the main church.

Back Tomorrow

Sue